Learning about the world

It's been an interesting year for me. Mostly because I'm learning stuff again. Not going to school, doing stuff in a structured way. I don't particularly have the patience for that anymore. I have what I feel I need in the way of credentials. With a little better preparation, I could have been in that position 12 years ago, but hey, live and learn, right? As long as we learn from it, I guess.

I tend to notice details, and I'm a reasonably curious human being. While you're noticing the pile of garbage on the ground, I'm seeing a piece of string in the pile and wanting to know what it's attached to. And while you want to know why this pile of garbage is on the ground, I want to know how it's useful to me.

That's where I'm a bit different, I guess. It's not a judgment; that's just how I'm wired. And I know that some of you don't care why the pile of garbage is on the ground, you just want it cleaned up.

Anyhow.

One of the great things about the universe we live in is that much of it has already been discovered and people have been writing manuals on it for millennia. Sure, we discover new things and learn that the old manuals have something fundamentally wrong with them – that doesn't make them any less interesting, and we could certainly learn something from the progression of thought (it will help our own thought progress as well).

Thinking about what I learned from Darwin's Origin of Species, I'm reminded that simply observing is a great big step in learning. Eventually you're going to get curious and ask about something.

And when you do, you don't have to start from scratch. Sure, get the basic foundations, but then you don't have to discover something for everybody else. Someone's most likely already done that, and you can learn for you. Yeah, be selfish about it.

Reading Einstein's Relativity was not really eye-opening. We kind of understand the theory, even when we're little kids. I'm sitting in a coffee shop while I'm writing this, and cars are driving by. They are moving relative to me and to my chair. My chair and I are moving relative to the cars. I am not moving relative to my chair. Einstein showed us how to measure that and figured out what it meant as things got smaller and smaller and faster and faster. That's interesting to me, though, again, not eye-opening.

I did, however, enjoy some of Einstein's humor. At the beginning of the book, he was us measuring the distance to a cloud by building a rod from the ground to the cloud and then measuring the rod (I'm guessing other translations probably have us taking standard-size rods and counting how many of them we stack to get to the cloud). Later, he has someone suspended in a chest floating through space. This is totally "3 Stooges" physics, and you know it's Shemp going up in that chest, but Curly putting the finishing touches on the rod before the thing topples over.

In case you missed it a couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Richard Feynman, who was so curious about the way things worked that when he felt his research stagnating, he went out and watched students play on the quad. A Frisbee got him working again (this was one of the guys who helped invent the atomic bomb – something he did not because he wanted to vanquish the enemy, but more because it was a physics problem he wanted to solve).

The other guy in that photo montage up at the top of this post is Mike Brown. He had Pluto declassified as a planet. He didn't set out to ruin Pluto. Rather, he set out to find another planet and instead found something that was bigger than Pluto but clearly not a planet. And he did this because he was curious about space. He had been since he walked out his door as a child and looked up.

You don't know everything. Go out there and learn about something you're interested in. Enjoy marketing? Learn about some of the psychology behind it, rather than just about what works. Enjoy coffee? Find out what roasting style you like best, and why. Enjoy beer or wine? Take the time to make your own, see what the process is like. Make sure you make some bad stuff, too – you want to know what you did wrong, as well.